This interview inspired me to go have a hunt for DoomRPG again, and, lo and behold, it's available on Vodafone. So I bought it, installed it, and blimey if it's not actually a lot of fun. It really does work well on a tiny screen with very simple controls - quite challenging at times, though, as I seem to be low on ammo and have to smash the zombies with my axe quite a lot. Reply0

I preordered this, played it, completed it (twice) and thoroughly enjoyed it. With the pre-order discount it came to just over £11, and it took me between 5 and 6 hours to complete on my first play, so I count that reasonably good value for money.

It does nothing new, but what it does, it does well. It's polished and fun. It's certainly no HL2; but then, what is? I'll almost certainly be getting the next episode anyway. Reply0

I'd happily share if they provided a torrent file I could use in a decent bit of torrent software. As for the app throttling its bandwidth - the old downloader certainly didn't, so how do I know if the new one does? What does it throttle it to? Does it know what other applications on my network are using? Why does Blizzard get to decide how much of my upstream I'm willing to give up? Reply0

"As long as this isn't affecting your ping, I fail to see the problem..."
But it will be. Blizzard's downloader, unlike every other torrent downloader, has no option to throttle back the upload speed. So it can easily saturate all your upstream bandwidth, leaving you nothing left for anything else. Like playing the bloody game. Reply0

"The fact that the Red Cross is also used in [videogames] which contain strong language and violence is also of concern to us in that they directly conflict with the basic humanitarian principles espoused by the Red Cross movement," Pratt stated.

The fact that the red cross (perfectly legally and in full accord with the Geneva Convention) is used in conflicts featuring the actual death of thousands of people (and possibly some strong language) doesn't concern him though? Reply0

"How terribly fashionable it is for faux intellectuals to pour scorn on the Da Vinci code. I haven't read it so I can't comment of course, though presumably all the haters sit at home and read Kafka through thick black rimmed spectacles?"

No. I count the Halo novelisations (well, the first and third anyway) as some of my favourite no-brain fun books. I read trashy pulp scifi and enjoy it enormously. I read kids' books like Potter and Garth Nix. I read comics/manga meant for teens. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying low-brow entertainment, as long is it's entertaining.

Dan Brown is an appalling writer. The ideas are stolen, the plots contrived, the characters paper-thin, the endings truly atrocious. I even gave the bugger another chance and tried a second of his books to see if the Code was an aberration, but unfortunately not. He truly is shit, and nothing short of a large wad of cash would ever convince me to read another of his books. Reply0

"As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected."
Is it April 1st already?

What utter bollocks. If that were the case, no-one would ever get a group, as I can count the number of WoW players I've met who can formulate a grammatically-correct sentence on the fingers of one hand.

I had decided to buy myself a PSP when the giga pack was released. But when I saw the apalling bundles, I changed my mind - by the time I'd bought a game I actually wanted, I'd have spent £300. No chance. I've now spent my hard-earned cash on a PDA instead.

Notice how Nintendo bundle the DS with the games that people actually want. Reply0

Tabla is an old spelling of Tabula. A perfectly Latin word meaning tablet/slate (while rasa is actually Sanskrit). 17th century philosopher John Locke, attributed to have coined the term - although the idea had already been introduced by Aristotle 2000 years before - actually used the spelling "Tabla Rasa"

I'm still not getting any hits from Lewis and Short for "tabla", nor from the corpus of Latin authors, which means that there is no existing spelling of "tabula" as "tabla" in Latin. Do you perhaps mean that it's a later spelling rather than an old spelling?

Also, "rasa" is Latin, not Sanskrit - it's the perfect participle passive feminine nominative of "rado", "I scrape", agreeing with the feminine nominative "tabula" "tablet". I believe that "rasa" in Sanskrit means something like "taste, essence, charm" and a whole bunch of other things, none of which give the meaning "scraped tablet" or "blank slate".

Further, a Google search for "John Locke tabla rasa" gets 476 hits, while "John Locke tabula rasa" gets 55,100, which makes me think that perhaps "tabula rasa" is the more commonly accepted spelling, even when discussing Mr Locke. The back of the book "Concerning Human Understanding" by Locke, indeed, spells it "tabula rasa".

Just to put everyone's mind at rest - "tabula rasa" is correct. "tabla" is the modern Spanish spelling, but "tabla" is not a Latin word. (I checked the corpus of Latin literature at the Perseus project, and "tabla" doesn't occur once.) Reply0

I've been enjoying this immensely - it's certainly "more of the same", but it's a lot of fun. I would never have paid £29.99 for it, though - that's "greedy, ugly profiteering" in my book - but I was happy to pay £17.99 from play.com.

I'm playing the beta (my mutation energy/elec blaster Ohm just reached level 20 and got his cape - yay!) and it was much easier to get a team together before the "empty" bug demolished everyone's friends lists. (This is a bug that occurs only on the beta servers and not retail servers, in case anyone is worried.)

I've since joined a supergroup that has a handful of similar level characters, and that's helped a lot. However - it is possible to solo with some builds. Blasters are quite decent at soloing, once you realise that you need to keep your distance and run away when it gets too dangerous. It's much slower progress completing a mission, but it is possible.

System_Shock said: "Finished downloading the latest part of HL2 a few nights ago and at the end it prompted for to take part in a survey. Did that and then viewed the results (not sure how to link to it). Something like 90% had DVD drives... "

If you check the results you'll see that at least 17.42% of Steam users (and possibly up to 24.12%) don't have a DVD drive. That's over 100 000 people who took part in the survey that don't have a DVD drive. Reply0

"It's surely a very small proportion of gamers who have all the kit to run Doom3 or Half-Life 2, yet don't have a DVD drive. I'd be interested to find out what sort of ratio the 6-CD copies sell to the DVD version in the States."

According to the hardware survey up to 25% of Steam users don't have a DVD drive. And most of those have machines capable of running HL2 - 90% of the users had processors over the 1.2GHz minimum speed.

I can only assume there is some regional variation in the take-up of DVD drives that makes it profitable in Europe but not in the US. Reply0

I'm currently about 40 hours into the game, and loving every minute of it. I've hardly touched the Item World, and not done too much levelling up, so some levels are a challenge - often I'm left with Laharl (my only really high-level, high HP character) against half a dozen enemies, and sometimes he only scrapes through by the skin of his teeth. It all adds to the fun! Reply0